Will we ever be able to 100% accurately perceive if someone is lying? Lying is apart of everyday life. It can be done in a positive way, to benefit a situation, or can be done in a negative way to make something worse. It can be done in something so simple as lying about what you were doing earlier to your friend, when really you were at the mall buying her a birthday present for her birthday that weekend. A negative example of lying would be a girlfriend cheating on her boyfriend, and lying about what she was doing instead. Then you have situations where you lie and agree with someone just to keep a conversation going. You also have compulsive liars who feel the need to lie about everything they do and talk about. Sometimes these people get so convinced on what they are lying about themselves, that they don’t even know how much they do it or when they do it. Both men and women lie in approximately a fifth of their social exchanges lasting 10 or more minutes; over the course of a week they deceive about 30 percent of those with whom they interact one-on-one. (Phycology Today, 1997.) Now if you’re in a criminal situation and they only have your feedback to go off of, they need to test whether or not you’re lying. In order to do this, they need to use a polygraph or brain scanner. These lie detecting technologies aren’t 100% effective. My question is if they will ever be improved or 100% accurate. While looking up how we benefit ourselves with the lie detection technologies we use today, I came across articles with a similar outlook and proposal. In the research, I was able to see all the experiments done from college students around the world for up to 40 years that led to what devices we use today. Right after reviewing this I was able to encounter a problem that would help me be a step closer for a result to my investigation. The problem that stood out most to me was that all these experiments were all done by college students. Right now the most common lie detection tool used is the Polygraph. It is wired up offenders, and twitching needles. The way it is set up to detect if someone is lying is through faster heart rates, shallow breath, and moist skin. Research states that this particular device will unlikely get any better. There are also two popular brain scanners that are used to detect lies. One of the scanners is called the electronic sensors. It measures an electrical signal, or “brainwave” called the P300, which appears when we recognize something. By looking for this signal, you could potentially tell if someone is hiding knowledge about something they are already familiar with, like a murder weapon. This method to detect lying is considered useful, but has been argued upon for years on how truly effective it is. Another popular method is the FMRI (Functional magnetic resonance imaging.) It shows the location of firing neurons in an indirect manner, by tracking the blood flow that supplies them with nutrients and oxygen. Several FMRI studies have shown that some parts of the brain are consistently more active when people tell lies rather than the truth, particularly areas at the very front that help us to suppress unwanted actions. (Will we ever, 2012) The scans detect lies up to 78-85% of the time. With that being said, there is a 15-20% chance of an innocent person being wrongly determined as a liar. With these methods of detecting lies not being 100% reliable, come reasons for why it is not so efficient. If someone tells the same lie over and over, and is convinced to their own self that it is not longer a lie, the test will not be able to detect if they are lying. Also if you focus on a big event that happened in the year you are getting interrogated about, you will be able to trick the test to wrongly mark that you aren’t telling a lie. By doing this, the accuracy of the test will go from 100% to 33% into detecting your lie. By the way things are, all we can do is sit back and wonder if the tests will ever improve or be 100% accurate. Right now all we can mainly rely on in the tests used are cues. Cues to deception are not that useful. There are ways that people act differently when they are lying than when they are telling the truth (that’s what a cue to deception is), but the differences are not all that big or reliable. (Psychology Today, 2013) Research states that improving lies detectors isn’t on the top of the list. Researchers do predict that over time improvement will be made, but picturing a general lie detector to lie on 100% right now is all science fiction. My solution to get more reliable results from experiments to improve lie detectors is to use a different audience then college students. The majority of the liars in prison are associated with different issues. These people can be involved in drugs and alcohol, mental issues, or considered a psychopath or clinically ant social. Interviews with people that have these certain problems are nothing compared to interviews with a college student being experimented in a laboratory. My result into improving lie detectors would be to test all different types of people ranging from people with drug and alcohol use, people with different types of disorders or a bad past, and people in different environments. I think the results of testing this type of audience will bring us to a more reality-like reaction.

Works Cited

DePaulo, Bella. "Psychology Today." Why Are We So Bad at Detecting Lies? N.p., 26 May 2013. Web.
Kornet, Allison. "Psychology Today." The Truth About Lying. N.p., 1 May 1997. Web.
Yong, Ed. "Future." Will We Ever Create a Perfect Lie Detector? N.p., 6 Apr. 2012. Web.